


morphic resonance

by windfalling



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Roleswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 13:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15582558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windfalling/pseuds/windfalling
Summary: In the grainy monochrome security footage, he watches the so-called terrorist march toward the spherical machine with ruthless determination, gun held steady in front of her. She fires back one shot out of frame, and then looks straight at the camera.This is not the first time Flynn has seen her before.In which Garcia Flynn, a history professor, is called in to take on the problem of Lucy Preston, an ex-NSA time-traveling terrorist.





	morphic resonance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deathmallow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathmallow/gifts).



> so i may have taken the concept of your prompted roleswap AU and selectively swapped certain things and also crammed like three other canon-divergent ideas to create... whatever this is. this kind of went in a very different direction than planned but i hope you enjoy it nevertheless!
> 
> title and certain time travel concepts borrowed from the zero escape series by kotaro uchikoshi.

**I.**

In the grainy monochrome security footage, he watches the so-called terrorist march toward the spherical machine with ruthless determination, gun held steady in front of her. She fires back one shot out of frame, and then looks straight at the camera. 

This is not the first time Flynn has seen her before.

 

 

“Look, I’m just a historian,” he’d said to Agent Christopher after seeing the other man in the room, the soldier with the familiar name. He’d held his hands palm-up in a careless shrug that belied none of the growing unease in him. Flynn had known then that he was very, very much out of his depth.

“A _world-class_ historian,” she’d said, holding one of his books up in her hand. “Don’t sell yourself short. And you’ll understand what I need you for soon.”

Then she’d pulled up the file on Lucy Preston, ex-NSA, and the shock had rippled through him, threatened to cut him at the knees.

It was _her_ , and yet it wasn’t. The woman he’d known had been older, maybe in her late thirties, early forties. Her hair had been shorter, just brushing past her chin. She’d looked exhausted most days, but her gaze had always been warm.

 _This_ woman was undeniably younger, her hair longer, her eyes colder, and something different in the way she carried herself.

Agent Christopher had looked sharply at him and his indrawn breath.

“You know her?”

“She just reminded of someone, that’s all,” he’d responded, after a moment. “But it isn’t her. I don’t recognise this woman at all.”

When Connor Mason arrives to present the impossible truth, Flynn finds it easier than it should be to reconcile it with his disbelief.

Flynn thinks of an old, worn journal hidden in his bedroom drawer. _When the time comes,_ she’d said, the day before she disappeared from his life, _you’ll understand—and you’ll know what to do._

 

 

It’s been so long since he’s touched that journal. He’d refused to even open it at first, when he realised she wasn’t coming back. But curiosity had gotten the better of him.

Nothing in that journal had made sense. His mind refused to even process it. Its existence had been an impossibility. So he’d hid it, and tried to forget the sight of his own handwriting telling wild fantastical tales of an adventure through time, of a mystical enemy named Rittenhouse, and of a woman who would raze the earth to defeat them.

It had been a fabrication, he’d told himself. All those meetings in his office, those talks over coffee, and then over dinner and wine—the manipulation of some deranged woman who had left him without a word, in the end.

Now, he wonders.

 

 

They travel back to 1937, to the date of the Hindenburg explosion. After his stomach settles from the nausea, he allows himself to dwell in the wonder of it all, of _time travel_ , committing every sight and smell and touch to memory. The historian in him is equal parts fascinated and terrified of the reality of the task at hand.

Flynn is there, presumably, to protect history. To act as a tour guide, essentially, and to lead the soldier to his mark with the ultimate goal of eliminating Lucy Preston, time-traveling terrorist.

Flynn refuses to let that happen—not before he gets his answers. Not before he finds out why she’d approached him, chosen him, all those years ago.

His accent draws more than a few curious eyes, as do Wyatt’s linguistic missteps. Rufus is, as he’d reminded them all sharply, invisible here, but none of them mistake that for his safety.

It is easy enough, especially with Wyatt’s interest in Kate Drummond, to stall and derail the mission when they get too close, to give _just_ enough information so that they do not doubt his presence.

Flynn knows, from his own research, what is supposed to happen to the Hindenburg. He knows, too, what Lucy plans to do—and the ripple effect it will have on history, if the journal is to be believed.

He has no intention of letting her murder hundreds of people—or prevent the formation of the United Nations. But he _does_ have to find a way to stop her before Wyatt does.

 

 

Nothing goes as planned. They somehow land in jail, which they only escape by staging a fight.

(“Punch me,” was Wyatt’s brilliant idea, and Flynn had looked at him incredulously, then shrugged, and then socked him in the face. The officer had only watched with amusement as they fought until Flynn had started faking respiratory distress—at which point the officer made the mistake of unlocking the cell.)

They still manage to find the bomb, but the Hindenburg still explodes, albeit with far fewer casualties, more lives saved than lost, and the future of the United Nations preserved.

It is there, amidst the fire and wreckage of the burning airship, that he finally finds her.

 

 

She is fury and rage before him, but he knows the future he must lead her to.

“I know you aren’t going to shoot, Lucy,” he says quietly. His voice is steady, even as his heart drums a frantic pace in his chest, even as he sees, just for a moment, the woman he once knew.

There is no recognition in her face. It hurts more than he thought it would. “Who the hell are you?” she demands.

“My name is Garcia Flynn. You asked me to help you, so here I am.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says flatly. “Let me pass, and I won’t hurt you.”

The journal had described the lengths she— _they_ —would go to in a war he would one day fight in.

It is his writing—but he is not the man who wrote it. Not yet.

“You know this isn’t the way to do it,” he says. “To get your family back.”

Lucy goes utterly still. Her arm falters, and for the first time, she looks at him—really looks at him this time, reassessing him with an intensity so familiar that his breath stutters.

“You would sacrifice the _United Nations_ , Lucy, really? Is that the kind of future you would bring your child back to?”

“You know _nothing_ of what’s at stake,” she says, and it’s nearly a snarl. She raises the gun again. The tremble in her hand tells him what a thin line she walks, a desperate edge to her voice, all that rage bottled in her small frame, but no less lethal.

He’d underestimated her, he realises, when her hand suddenly steadies with newfound resolve.

Behind him, Wyatt fires his gun.

 

 

A memory:

She’s stretched out on his bed, all lazy limbs, eyes scrunched shut against the morning light. He’s watching her in quiet study, tracing every thin pale line and faded pink scar, committing her to memory. There’s one at her shoulder, a white ragged oval that catches his attention. She’s never talked about what she’s gone through in life, to have so many of them. He has his own suspicions, but he’s content to wait. They have time.

 

 

In the ensuing chaos, Lucy disappears, and Wyatt’s dragging him back toward safety, back to the Lifeboat.

“What the hell was that?” Wyatt demands, all intimidation and laser-sharp focus.

Flynn narrows his eyes, doesn’t back down. “What are you talking about?”

“With Preston. You said something to her—”

“She was holding a gun to my face, what else was I supposed to do, tackle her?”

“ _Enough_ ,” Rufus says, sweeping his eyes over the two of them, checking their seatbelts before turning around and buckling himself in. “It’s over. She’s gone. It’s done. Time to go home before we mess up something else.”

The Lifeboat begins to whir and rattle around them. They’ve changed history, now, and whether it is for the worse or the better remains to be seen. Flynn closes his eyes and thinks only of how she’d held her face in his hands that very last day and said, _Until we meet again._

It had been both a farewell and a promise. He understands that, now.

 

 

**II.**

“I’ve done some terrible things in my lifetime,” she said absently. She was not looking at him. It was only when she lifted the bottle of whiskey and found it empty that she seemed to recollect herself at last, and seemed more present.

“We all have our own regrets,” he said. “This film, for one,” he added, gesturing to the television they’d long began to ignore, some cheesy action film so terrible it had been amusing, at first, until they’d both grown bored of it. His attempt at levity landed; she smiled, briefly, before her gaze grew distant once more.

There were times, Flynn thought, that she seemed to disappear from herself entirely.

“Say that you had to do something awful in order to save someone,” she said.

“Hypothetically?” he said wryly. “I’m going to need a little more than that.”

“Like, in order to prevent an evil organisation from rising to power, you had to kill someone who happened to be in the wrong place or the wrong time. Or maybe you had to help some bad people. Would you?”

“Is this what you’re like when you get drunk? You debate the merits of utilitarianism?”

“I’m being serious,” she said stubbornly.

“Well,” he said indulgently, “I’d try to find another way. One that doesn’t involve murder.”

“But if there _isn’t_ ,” she insisted. “Absolutely isn’t. Don’t you have a moral duty to protect the greater good?”

“It depends what you sacrifice to achieve it. What is the outcome worth, in the end, if the cost was too high? To whom does the greater good serve? Certainly not those you’ve sacrificed along the way.”

“A pyrrhic victory.” Lucy lapsed into a brooding silence, her teeth worrying at her bottom lip. After a moment, he reached out and gently brushed the corner of her mouth with his thumb.

“Yes. But this is only,” he reminded her, “a hypothetical.”

She sighed. “Too many things have changed. It’s getting harder to remember what should’ve been. But I found you, in the end,” she said, and smiled one of her rare, unguarded smiles at him. “Eleventh time’s the charm, I suppose.”

He had learned quickly that she could drink him under the table. It was only when she began talking of nonsensical things that he knew she was getting more than a little tipsy.

“All right,” he said, “I think it’s time for bed.”

He lifted her into his arms, and she made a contented noise and pressed her face into his chest. Her arms locked around his neck, and she refused to let go, so that he was forced to brace himself on his elbows over her in the bed. Eventually, she begrudgingly loosened her arms to allow him to position the both of them more comfortably.

Lucy pressed her palm to his chest, over his heart. She said, looking far more sober than she had been earlier, “I would.”

He twined his fingers through with hers, brought the hand on his chest to his lips. “Would what?”

“Sacrifice everything,” she said.

 

 

Time travel comes with a cost.

When Flynn opens the door to his home, the first thing he sees are the photo frames hanging on walls that had previously been bare. It’s _him_ , him in a place he does not remember with a woman he does not know, a woman who is wearing a _wedding dress_ , and they’re both smiling and looking not at the camera, but at each other, and Flynn thinks: _fuck._

Her name is Lorena, he discovers later. Lorena Flynn.

 

 

He feels like the worst kind of asshole for walking out on his presumably lovely wife, but he doesn’t know how to do it, how to pretend to be a husband to this woman he does not know in a home that is no longer his alone, how to _want_ to be her husband.

He thinks it would be very easy to fall in love with Lorena. Maybe he would have, once, if things were different. If he had met her in his own time. If he hadn’t been enlisted in some task force hunting down a time-traveling terrorist wearing the face of another woman he once loved.

None of the others have had their entire lives uprooted like this. Only him. “Damn,” Rufus says appreciatively when he shows them a picture; Wyatt is deeply amused; neither of them show the appropriate concern Flynn thinks he deserves for having his life so thoroughly screwed over.

Later, he discovers that his mother has passed away in this timeline, too. It is this, more than anything, that brings him back to the journal.

When Wyatt offers up his couch, Flynn takes it.

 

 

It is no longer easy to dismiss the journal as the writings of a madman, now that Flynn has travelled through time, and met the younger version of someone he had known.

It is frustratingly vague at some points, and oddly specific at others. Some things in it are hardly relevant. The first half of the journal seems to be more of a recollection: smaller details omitted for major events, some things summarised as merely a time and place and the historical significance of it. The writing in the second half grew more frantic, almost obsessive. There is a turning point in it: something had gone wrong in 1780. The political landscape it describes is wildly different than the one he knows and recognises now. Their team is fractured: Mason Industries taken over, Agent Christopher disappearing, Jiya having seizures, Rufus getting kidnapped, Rittenhouse agents after them at every turn. They are on the run, but they’re— _he’s_ —getting desperate.

 _Is this how you felt, Lucy?_ this alternate version of himself writes. _If only you could see us now. I wonder how different things would be, if we had worked together from the start. Wyatt thinks I’m ‘out of my damn mind,’ to use his words, but I think you’re our last hope, Lucy. You’ve been gone since the New York trip. But I know you haven’t given up. We’ll make things right, this time._

 

 

They chase Lucy through time: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the atomic bomb tests in Las Vegas, to a castle in Germany in 1944.

“I wish you would understand,” Lucy says, “that there’s a greater good here.”

“Working with _Nazis_ , assassinating _President Lincoln_ , that’s all part of your greater good? Screw everyone, just as long as you get what you want in the end?”

Her mouth twists, anger flashing in her eyes. She has the barrel of her gun pressed against his chest and she can kill him in an instant, but all he can think is: God, this is surreal. His gaze catches on the little details of her face that he had missed in the firelight of the Hindenburg, how strange and foreign and familiar she is, all at once.

“I hate this as much as you do. But I’m not doing this for me.”

“Noah, was it? Your husband?” he says, and her composure fractures, and for that fleeting instant, she looks so _young_ , and so small, nothing like the vengeful angel he’d seen in the firelight of the Hindenburg. Then it passes, and it’s as if he’d never said anything at all.

When Ian Fleming approaches her, Flynn bites back the urge to move in her defense. He doesn’t need to, in the end. The moment she senses she’s outnumbered, she screams in terror and shouts in German, pointing at them both. As they’re dragged away, her baleful glare follows them out.

 

 

The name _Rittenhouse_ comes up in some shape or form each time. While the journal has some details wrong, others are frighteningly identical, and each trip pulls him away, step by step, from his lingering disbelief.

Faith had never come easy to him: his mother was the religious one. When his older brother died, she had spent her mourning praying on bended knee in chapels, and he had grown disillusioned of it all.

If the journal is real, if the woman he met in the past wasn’t a strange fever dream, if he truly met a future version of Lucy Preston—

Rittenhouse isn’t the thread, he thinks. It’s her.

 

 

Flynn takes Rufus out for a drink in the noisiest, busiest bar he knows. It’s a little ways off from the university, but it’s still a Friday, and classes are still in session, and it’s packed with drunk undergrads.

“I didn’t really think this was your scene,” Rufus remarks with raised eyebrows.

Flynn shrugs. It was, perhaps, not the best choice of venue, but it was all he could think at the moment for what he plans to say. He doesn’t lead off with it, though—he makes small talk with Rufus about his work in Mason Industries, about his family, about Jiya (“Look, one bad date doesn’t mean everything’s ruined. I’ve seen the way she looks at you—there’s still something salvageable there.” “We skipped _dessert_ to go home. And not together. It was that bad.”).

Then, when Rufus finally relaxes into his drink, Flynn says, “I know about the recorder, Rufus.”

To his credit, Rufus only blinks at him, frozen for a half second before he says, a bemused look to his face, “Recorder? I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

He’s a better liar than Flynn thought he would be. There’s none of the awkward fumbling or stuttering he expected from him. “For Rittenhouse,” Flynn says. “I know Connor Mason put you up to it. I know they’ve threatened your family.”

There’s the reaction he’s been waiting for at last: Rufus’ jaw drops, and the sheer panic on his face is almost comical. “How did—what—are you—”

Flynn pulls out the journal and pushes it toward Rufus with no small amount of reluctance. It feels like pulling teeth, showing it to him. But it’s the only way he knows how to explain.

“This is my journal. From the future,” Flynn adds casually, and Rufus’ eyes go wide. “I need your help.”

 

 

“So you want to work _with_ the crazy terrorist,” Rufus says, many drinks later.

“That’s the plan,” Flynn says.

Rufus just shakes his head and mutters something to himself underneath his breath. “Okay, so _if_ this journal is really from the future, and you’re _not_ messing with me—you know that this isn’t accurate anymore, right? Some of this stuff never happened. Like, we managed to save Andrew Johnson, Seward, _and_ Ulysses S. Grant, not _just_ Andrew Johnson. And you’re not married here. Things have changed.”

“I think this is the closest one,” Flynn says.

“What do you mean?”

“The most accurate one to this timeline, I don’t know. It’s just something she mentioned. It was her eleventh try, or something.”

“Right, there’s _that_ , too. Future Lucy. Which is even more of an impossibility because we can’t travel into our own timelines.”

“Why not?”

“It would be _really bad._ On like, a time and space and the universe-level bad. Theoretically.”

“Maybe we can’t _now_ ,” Flynn says, “but so was time travel, not so long ago. You and Jiya and Mason, all working together? I think you’d manage to find a way.”

“Eleventh try,” Rufus says thoughtfully. “She’s changed her own timeline eleven times? Or maybe—maybe she’s jumped to eleven different timelines?”

“What, like a parallel universe?”

“Yeah. Except not just one, but countless different universes that exist branching off of every decision we’ve made. For example, there might be a universe out there where you _didn't_ choose this shitty bar and we went somewhere else instead, and that timeline exists and keeps going parallel to ours.”

 _Eleven times_ , she’d said, and he wonders how many versions of himself she met, if he’d always been so intrigued and enamoured with the mysterious woman who kept showing up at his office hours and his classes despite not being a student of his, or how much of it was real for her and how much of it was cold-hearted calculation on her end, part of the price she would pay to achieve the greater good.

The thought settles unpleasantly in his stomach.

“We need to tell Wyatt,” Rufus says abruptly.

They both contemplate the consequences of his suggestion.

“What do you propose, that we say, ‘Hey, Wyatt, guess what? You know that woman who wants to burn down the world and kill us all? The one you’ve been ordered to eliminate? Yeah, it turns out we want to help her, after all.’” Flynn downs the rest of his drink. “ _That_ will go down well, I’m sure.”

“But we’re a _team_. He won’t trust her, but he’ll trust us, at least. We can’t do this without him. He’s the only one who can shoot a gun,” Rufus says, and when Flynn frowns, Rufus says, “Your aim’s shit, Flynn. You nearly _shot_ me that one time. ”

“Not just Wyatt,” Flynn finally says. “We need Agent Christopher on our side.”

 

 

They never get the time to have that conversation—the truth comes out at the worst possible moment. The Mothership jumps to 1972, and they follow, but they don’t get to the tapes in time. They’re captured and tied up by Lucy’s hired hands, and as Lucy plays the untampered tape for them all, Flynn gets the final confirmation that he needs at last.

 _Rittenhouse plays by different rules._ It’s in Nixon’s voice, it’s his words. Something about hearing it said aloud yanks it that final step from delusion and myth to reality.

“We know Rittenhouse is evil,” Flynn finds himself saying, and he feels Wyatt’s gaze drilling into the back of his skull, “but what you’re doing—the things you’re willing to sacrifice and change in history—”

“I’m doing what’s necessary to save our present. It doesn’t matter what I change. Not if Rittenhouse still exists. And no, you clearly have no idea what you’re dealing with.” Lucy pauses and narrows her eyes at Rufus. “Well, maybe one of you does.”

“Rufus?” Wyatt’s voice is deadly quiet. “What is she talking about?”

“I don’t know,” Rufus immediately denies, and sends Flynn an accusing glare, but the damage has been done. Wyatt looks between the two of them, and his face closes, any lingering trust gone.

And, well, his future self hadn’t mentioned any of _this_ in the journal, and he didn’t realise that she would know. Except, Flynn thinks, it does make sense, when he remembers the one crucial link Lucy has to Rittenhouse—one that none of the others know.

“I do know what you’re dealing with,” Flynn says, trying to shift the subject away from Rufus. “I know that they’re trying to take over the world by remaking history. I know that you’ve been the only one fighting and standing in their way for so long. But you don’t have to be.”

Lucy stares at him while Wyatt begins to protest.

“What are you offering,” she says, “exactly?”

“My help. _Ours_. You’ve no chance against them alone. You won’t succeed. Neither of us will. But we stand stronger together than apart. We could make a great team, Lucy, you and I.”

Something shifts in her gaze, and he doesn’t dare break it. She isn’t too far gone yet. He can sense it in the same way he can read the furrow in her brow as careful contemplation and not rejection. She may not be _exactly_ the same as the woman he’d known, but she’s still _Lucy_.

“Are you fucking insane?” Wyatt snarls beside him, and just like that, it chases the hesitation from her face.

“This one doesn’t seem too keen,” she remarks.

“He will be,” he insists, but she’s already moving, a knife at her hands. She cuts the ropes for him and Rufus, but she leaves Wyatt tied and holds up her gun to his head.

“Get me the missing doc Nixon mentioned,” she says, “and then I’ll consider your offer.”

 

 

When they find the doc and realise what—or rather, _who_ —it is, Flynn knows that they need to keep her safe. They set up Lucy and the Rittenhouse agents against each other, and they rescue Wyatt. Flynn can’t shake the feeling of betrayal.

“I’d love to think that your little speech back in that room was all a lie to get me out,” Wyatt says, when they’re back in the Lifeboat, “but somehow, I don’t think it was.”

“It’s a long story,” Flynn says.

“Better told over drinks,” Rufus adds. “Trust me.”

Wyatt’s jaw clenches, but he nods. “Fine. But you better tell me everything. _Both_ of you.”

 

 

Agent Christopher, as it turns out, had been doing some investigating of her own. She takes it well, all things considered. But working with Lucy is another matter altogether.

“She’s a terrorist,” Christopher says firmly. “I refuse to sanction a murder-spree across history—”

“She’s fighting against people who have and are going to do far worse,” Flynn argues. “We aren’t planning to kill anyone. But if we pool our resources and our intel together—”

“Have you forgotten how she nearly sabotaged the first moon landing? Her methods are extreme—”

“—common enemy, _Rittenhouse_ , we won’t achieve—”

And so it goes. Agent Christopher rescinds the kill order on Lucy, making it their mission to capture her alive instead. Whether or not she’ll agree to working with Lucy—and whether  _Lucy_ will cooperate—is still uncertain. But it’s a start, he thinks, and a step away from the future that the journal predicts.

 

 

**III.**

He found her sitting in Memorial Church. She was in the very last pew, gazing at the stained glass. He sat next to her and didn’t say anything. He just waited.

Finally, she said, “My whole life, I believed that everything happened for a reason. That the choices we made are part of some larger plan. That it all has meaning, in the end.”

“And now?”

“Now… I have to believe that the choices we make matter. That we _can_ change things for the better. But maybe—maybe there are certain people who come into our lives for a reason. People who, no matter what universe or timeline it is, are constants.”

“Is this your roundabout way of saying that we were meant for each other?”

She laughed. “Something like that,” she said softly.

 

 

It’s 1780. Flynn knows that something that happens here, or after this, changes everything.

Lucy offers an exchange: the Mothership and the name of Jessica Logan’s killer in return for their help to kidnap a man named Benedict Arnold. Arnold, as it turns out, knows the founder of Rittenhouse himself.

It seems too easy. Flynn knows that it isn’t as simple as killing one man. But Rufus offers up his vote, as does Wyatt. Flynn’s initial instinct is to protect history, but Wyatt reminds him that killing one man may save more people than it harms. He used to think that his duty was to preserve the past. But if doing so means abiding by evil—maybe that isn’t always the right answer, after all.

 

 

On their way to David Rittenhouse’s estate, Lucy pulls her horse up next to his.

“I thought you were bluffing, back then, in 1972,” she says. She glances sidelong at him. “Were you?”

“No. Not about that, or my offer.”

She gives a short, derisive laugh. “Backstabbing me is a great way to prove that you want to help.”

“I’m not going to debate that decision with you, Lucy. But I promise you that I do know something of what you’re going through.”

“Do you,” she says, clearly doubtful.

“You want to kill David Rittenhouse. Is this not a suicide mission, then, for you?”

And there it is, Flynn thinks: the other reason this gives him pause. _I would sacrifice everything_ , she’d said.

Her face goes carefully blank. “Well, I hope not to kill myself in the process.”

He lowers his voice. “Don’t you? What will happen to you, after your ancestor is killed?”

She jerks on the reins of her horse and comes to an abrupt stop. Her face has gone utterly white. Flynn pauses a few paces away, nodding at Wyatt to keep going when he glances back at them.

“How did you know?”

“You told me. In a way.” He’d known that this was coming. The journal has felt so much a part of him that he is reluctant to give it away. But he knows that she needs it more than he does, now.

He continues, “When you were NSA, you found that Rittenhouse was bankrolling Mason Industries. You did what you were supposed to do: you reported it to your superiors. Then, a short time later, your husband was murdered, your son went missing, and you were framed for it. That’s the story you told Wyatt. But what you didn’t tell him was that when you dug deeper, you found a familiar name tied to Rittenhouse: your own mother. Carol Preston.”

“How?” she repeats.

“You ran for a long time. Somewhere along the way, you decided to fight back. You still had contacts in the NSA. You found out about the Mothership. And what better way to strike back than to use their own invention against them?”

She’d dismissed him as a threat before—he is, after all, not the pilot, or the soldier, but the historian. But she’s looking at him now. “Who are you, exactly?”

“You told me all this, Lucy, sometime in the future, and I wrote it down a journal. And then you traveled back in time to deliver it to me.” He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls the journal out. “If we make it through this, it’s yours.”

Flynn starts moving forward to catch up with the others. After a moment, Lucy follows.

 

 

They continue the journey in interminable silence that breaks only when he can no longer tolerate it. He starts talking about comics and horses named Dynamite and how he wanted to be a cowboy as a kid, and he’s rambling, he knows, but he wants to hear her voice again, he’d _missed_ her all this time and he never realised how much, and he’ll take what he can get, even if it is her telling him to shut up.

Lucy doesn’t trust him, and he can’t blame her. They’re on fragile ground, with their newfound alliance, but he has to believe that it isn’t temporary.

She’s silent at first, and he nearly gives up. But then she says, “I used to want to be in a band,” and he exhales, all that tension unraveling, a smile playing at his lips.

“Yeah? What instrument?”

She casts a quick glance over at him, as if she’d expected him to have all the answers. “I wanted to sing,” she admits. “Nearly dropped out of college to do it, too.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“My mother,” she says, voice clipped, but before he can pursue the topic, she speaks again. “Do you know if—my son. Is he alive, in the future?”

Her knuckles have turned white on the reins. He wonders if she knows how much of herself she has revealed, with that one question. If the others, too, can see what he sees: someone who was once good in a simple and uncomplicated way, before she was pushed to the very brink of her humanity, now fighting with the thinnest thread of hope. He cannot give her the answer that she wants. It would be more cruel, he thinks, to lie.

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “The journal doesn’t mention what happened to him.”

Her mouth compresses into a tight line. She lifts her hand to her collarbone in a motion that seems more unconscious than deliberate, and he remembers the locket she’d always worn, even in the past. Her fingers close over air.

Lucy turns her head forward and does not speak again for the rest of the trip.

 

 

Things go wrong, in that it isn’t simple, after all, and it isn’t only one man: John Rittenhouse is a young child with the same eyes and the same hateful rhetoric as his father.

Lucy shoots David Rittenhouse, but his son disappears—and by the time she finds him, Flynn is already there.

Maybe this is what he had to prevent, he thinks, or maybe they’ve already changed enough, maybe this makes no difference at all, but he knows that he cannot stand by and watch her murder a child, even if he is Rittenhouse, even if he is all that is left.

“Don’t do this, Lucy,” he says, _pleads_ , one arm flung to the side to block the child, the other raised in front of him. “I know you don’t want to do this. There are others, he said as much, he’s just a boy, killing him won’t change anything—”

“You don’t know that! He’s _exactly_ like this father, he’s going to do terrible things—” Her voice is raw and anguished, and she’s visibly shaking, and the gun is in her hands, and he suddenly realises that there’s a strong possibility that she may just kill them both, after all.

“Lucy. Look at me. He’s just a boy, he can make different choices, I know I did, I wanted to be a _cowboy_ , for God’s sake, and you wanted to be in a _band_. Lucy, I know you, I know that you don’t want to do this,” and he does know, she’d been so surprisingly gentle with the boy when they first saw him, smiling and asking him questions about his family, and Rittenhouse, deftly getting the answers they need, but not what they want. Every single word out of the boy’s mouth had condemned him further, and he’d watched as that smile on Lucy’s face had grown more strained with each rebuttal against any disagreement with Rittenhouse’s goals, with his father.

Lucy squeezes her eyes shut and turns away, an awful broken sob wrenching out of her chest, but he doesn’t allow himself to believe that she’s given up.

“I promised you, Lucy, didn’t I? That I would help you. And I _will_ , but not like this, Lucy. Think of your son. What will happen to him? How can you kill this boy and ever face him again?”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Lucy turns back to them, advances three steps. “I am thinking of him,” she says, and raises her gun—

But the boy’s gone. Somewhere in those few seconds, he’d managed to run off into the woods, and the relief almost brings him to his knees.

After a few minutes of what they both knew would be an unsuccessful search for the boy, Lucy marches up to him and snarls, “ _You._ ”

Flynn doesn’t move from the tree he’s leaning on. He’s so, so tired.

“I prefer Garcia,” he says. “Or Flynn. That works, too.” Just once, he wants to hear her say his name again. Even if it is in a murderous rage.

“You want to help me? You can start by telling me where he is as an adult, when he’s made his _choices_. And then you can help me find the others.”

Flynn can hear Wyatt’s voice in the distance, shouting for him. He has the vague feeling that Lucy would drag him along with her, if she could, but he knows he has the physical advantage, even with his lack of combat training.

“No. We need a better plan than this. And we need the resources of the rest of the team, whether you like it or not. I know that the company isn’t safe right now. We’re working on it. But I know that we can find a better way of doing this that doesn’t involve poorly planned assassinations across time.”

Flynn pulls out the journal from his coat—slowly, pausing only when she jerks her gun back up to him—and hands it over to her, along with the address of his apartment.

“Just—just read it before you do anything else. Please. When you’re ready to talk about it, come find me.”

The voices are getting louder. Lucy hovers, caught in her indecision, her fury tempered but still there.

He says, “You need to go, Lucy.”

She makes a frustrated sound, low in her throat, almost like a growl. Then she turns and disappears into the woods.

 

 

**IV.**

This was the third time he’d seen her in his lectures. She sat at the back of the auditorium with a pen and notebook, watching him intently. More than once, he’d met her gaze and stumbled over his words. She was older than most of his students—late thirties, maybe early forties. He had a large class, but it was mid-semester, and he recognised most of them by now. He knew with certainty that she was not one of them.

Every time, she disappeared before he could get a chance to speak with her. She had begun to approach him once, a few days ago, and he’d caught sight of her hovering at the back of the line of students waiting for him. The uncertainty in her face had surprised him—with how focused her gaze had been during his lectures, she hadn’t struck him as the shy type. But by the time he’d looked back at her, she was gone.

Then, a week later, there she was, knocking on his office door.

“Hi,” she said, lifting her hand in an awkward little wave. “My name is Lucy Preston. I’ve been auditing one of your classes. I went to your lecture on the Lincoln assassination the other day—I was wondering if I could speak with you about it for a moment?”

 _Lucy_. It suited her. Flynn smiled, and gestured to the chair across from his desk. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lucy.”

 

 

The Mothership makes a series of quick jumps: another in 1780, two days before their trip, and then in 1786, 1790, and then 1794. She’s searching for John Rittenhouse. But not even they can find any trace of him in history; he assumes that she won’t be able to, either.

When the next few days pass without any activity from the Mothership, they all begin to relax. “Thank _God_ ,” Rufus mutters to himself, the strain of being their sole pilot beginning to wear at him. Flynn knows he won’t be resting, though—he’s still training Jiya as their back-up, and there are certain improvements to the Lifeboat that they’re working on together.

In the week that goes by, many things happen:

Jiya and Rufus finally go on another date. Rittenhouse launches a thinly-veiled takeover of Mason Industries, effectively removing Agent Christopher from her position. They take the Lifeboat on an unsanctioned—and ultimately unsuccessful—trip to get Wyatt’s wife back. And in a secret warehouse in the middle of the night, Agent Christopher gathers the time team and they begin planning their retaliation against Rittenhouse.

Then, just as Flynn stops waiting for her knock at the door, he finds her sitting at his kitchen table, flipping through a magazine that isn’t his.

“It’s about time,” Lucy says, not looking up at him. “Went on a date? I’m assuming it didn’t go well, if you’re here alone.”

“Wyatt turned down the invitation for coffee,” he says dryly. “Have you eaten?”

“I stole an apple from your fridge.” She sets the magazine down and glances out the window. “You have a tail, by the way.”

He’s noticed. It’s made scheduling their meetings far more trouble than it's worth.

Suddenly, he wonders if they’ve bugged his apartment, too. He wouldn’t put it beyond them. “Should I be worried about this conversation?”

“I took care of it.”

“I don’t suppose you would care to elaborate,” he says. She just gives him a tired look. “Nope, didn’t think so.”

He settles on the seat across from her. Waits.

“I’m ready to listen,” she finally says, and places the journal between them.

 

 

If he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine that they’re right back at his house, and it’s the middle of semester, he’d be up late grading papers, and she’d be sitting there with a book from his shelf, or watching the news on his television with the volume turned down low, before falling asleep curled up on the couch.

He’d held her in his arms, once. Known the softness of her hair, the feel of it sliding through his fingers. It seems like the strangest, most impossible thing, somehow, like a lingering dream he never quite woke up from.

But it’s been two years since he’s seen her, and this Lucy keeps her smiles well-guarded. He doesn’t tell her the details of the time he spent with her future self, or how long she stayed, or how he’d made space for her in his closet after only two weeks of knowing her, or how he’d been a half hour late to one of his classes once (he still blames it on her), or any of the other little things that are still alive in his memory.

He does not tell her any of this, but somehow, she knows. Not all of it. Not any of the details. But she keeps _looking_ at him in a certain way, as if he’s a puzzle she’s trying to solve.

“Garcia,” she says quietly, the vowels of his name hesitant on her tongue, as if testing it out. Testing him.

He feels himself flinch.

“I’m sorry. I still don’t—this is just—”

“I meant what I said, Lucy. All I’m asking is for us to work together to defeat Rittenhouse. We need you as much as you need us. Compromises will have to be made, but… we’ll figure something out. We’ll get your son back, Lucy. And your husband.”

Her face goes soft and curious and sad, all at once. Her fingers tap over an open page of the journal absently, over where he’s written her name.

Finally, she says, “All right. What’s the plan?”

 

 

**V.**

The last page in the journal is not written in his hand, and it's dated a few years into the future.

_Come find me at the place where we first met._

 

 

The lecture hall is empty except for one person, sitting at the very back, a newspaper in hand.

Lucy lifts her hand in a little wave to where he’s standing at the bottom, by the podium. All these years, and it’s as if nothing’s changed. As if they’d never fought Rittenhouse, or traveled through time, and they were just two people living their normal lives, meeting each other again.

“Hello, Garcia,” she says when he approaches. There’s an apologetic undertone to her voice. He wonders how much time has passed for her, or if it was only yesterday that he’d been half-asleep in bed when she’d cupped his face in her hands and whispered a few words into his ear before she left.

He lets out a long breath. “Lucy.”

“I take it,” she says, after a moment of silence, “that we aren’t together.”

He gives a little shrug of his shoulders, head tipping to the side in consideration. “Not exactly,” he says quietly. “It’s not the same.”

And it’s _Lucy_. He knows this, knows that at the core of it all, the essence of her is still unchanged, still her. But this Lucy comes to him with the familiarity of the past and a different history in her bones. This Lucy had made choices that the present Lucy did not—would not, perhaps, now. Their paths have diverged to different destinations. 

Flynn thinks of the nights spent drinking whiskey in present-Lucy's bunker room, of the time spent cataloguing all her familiar quirks and habits—but also the slow discovery of all the new ones, too. He’s made it his mission, lately, to find all the new things that made her smile.

(She has many different smiles, he’s realised—there’s the closed-mouth one that she does when she finds him amusing and doesn’t want him to know, or the wry one with a crooked slant when she’s indulging one of his ideas, or the soft, unguarded one when she thinks he isn’t looking. His favourite, by far, is the one she had when he’d stepped out of the Lifeboat with her son cradled in his arms, the boy safe and happy and unharmed.)

Flynn finally takes the seat next to her. “Can I ask you something? Was everything… was it all just a means to an end?”

Her face goes soft. “Oh, Garcia,” she murmurs, and what it does to him to hear her say his name like that again, memory and longing brought sharply into the present. What it does to him, to have her here. “You have to ask?”

“I just,” he begins, then looks away, chest tight, “I wondered, that’s all.”

“It was selfish of me, to stay as long as I did.”

“I’m glad you did,” he says. “I don’t regret it. Even now.”

“No. Neither do I.”

She has that look on her face again, the one that he’d never quite been able to understand until recently. He says, “It was supposed to be me, wasn’t it? I was supposed to go back and give my journal to you.”

Lucy nods.

“How did I... how did it happen?”

“Does it matter?”

“I suppose not.”

Flynn pulls out the journal, holds it for a moment. “It’s done,” he says. “We tracked down the last known sleeper agent a month ago. They’ve no economic or political support anymore, thanks to your grandfather. Your son is safe. The future you’ve sacrificed everything for—we have it.”

He holds it out to her. She takes the journal and brushes her fingers over the worn leather. “But if—”

“I’m writing a new one,” he says. “This was yours. You should have it.”

Lucy looks away and blinks several times. When she speaks again, her voice is steady. “Thank you.”

“What happens to you now?”

“I’m not sure,” Lucy admits. “When we change things in the past, our current consciousness replaces the one in the changed future—but we don’t regain what we’ve lost in the shift. But Rufus thinks that we might be able to. He has this theory, something about a collective memory—morphic resonance, I think he called it—and that we’re capable of unlocking our memories of other timelines. _How_ that’s possible, well, he’s not quite there yet.”

“He and Jiya will figure it out, I'm sure," Flynn says. Maybe they'll meet each other again, and maybe they won't, and he finds that he is strangely at peace with that. The old ache in his chest has quieted and dulled; neither of them are the same as they've been before.

Lucy smiles and leans in to cup his cheek in her hand. He closes his eyes. She presses a kiss to his forehead, lingers there, and then lets go.

“Goodbye, Garcia.”

 

 

Outside the building, there’s a familiar face waiting for him.

Lucy—the present Lucy—makes the same, awkward waving motion as her future self had only minutes before, giving him the most jarring feeling of déjà vu.

He pulls up short. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought you might want someone to talk to, after. And I was curious,” she admits. She’s a little hesitant, not as self-assured as she usually is. “I did read everything in that journal, so when you disappeared today, I thought you might be here. And Jiya offered to babysit.”

“I did meet her.” Flynn tilts his head. “Did you see her?”

“No,” she says, sounding disappointed. “I didn’t think it was a good idea.”

“Maybe it’s for the best. I don’t know how the universe would react to two Lucys interacting.”

“I’m sure _you’d_ like it,” she comments dryly, and then instantly blushes with regret.

He lets out a burst of shocked laughter. “ _Lucy._ ”

Instead of backtracking, she doubles down. “It’s true. Don’t you even try to deny it, Flynn.”

He grins. “I never said it wasn’t,” he says mildly. “But I think one is enough for me.”

Her smile is more hesitant this time. “Yeah?”

Rittenhouse is gone, and there are no more entries in the journal. The future is unknowable. There is, he thinks, a certain comfort to that. They’ll figure things out. They have all the tomorrows to come.

Flynn holds out his hand, and she takes it.

 


End file.
